RMNP, July 12 & 13, 2013

Fished in RMNP on Friday and Saturday while on vacation.  Got up around 5:30am and was up the trail and fishing by 6:05am. It is so nice to be close by these places.  Even though I had gotten up "late", I was still able to get to the river in plenty of time to fish.  I want to fish until about 9am every day and then head back to the cabin to hang out with the family.  Like the entire park, the scenery around there is amazing - the chance to see large animals and many different types of birds and of course the fish.  There is something about fish in beautiful places must make them even more amazing.

I started off in a huge riffle (comparatively for this small river) and a hug bend pool with slow water and a deep stretch.  I was sure there was some big fish in there, but I'll never know.  I did manage to hook a few, but only landed one nice brookie that had amazing coloration.

Basically in this type of boulder and pocket water, you just leapfrog over the fast water and hit the slow seams and runs.  Problem is you need to stand in the middle of the river in order to not snag in a tree - but it is inevitable, you will end up in the trees anyways.  The water was surprisingly not as cold as I thought it would be, although it was still cold.  The bottom consists of slippery rocks and drops into deeper than expected water.  I took a few nut-dunks when I was expecting the water to be a little shallower.  Below is one stretch where I actually checked my phone and found I had 3 texts from my boss telling me I was up next on the call to discuss June financials.  No, I didn't join the call, I actually sent him this pic telling him I was busy in my office and couldn't make the call.  Crazy this is, I had better 3G reception here then I do at our cabin in Grand Lake!

I could babble on about how beautiful it was and the fish I caught, but here are the pics instead.

One crazy story I have to share.  I had just gotten into the water and was fishing the bend pool when a green hummingbird flew in front of me and was eyeballing me.  I was wearing my neon orange shirt - so I'm sure that threw him off - he just stayed about 20 feet in front of me and would swerve over to my left and look at me, then swerve over to my right and look again.  Not exactly sure what I was, he hung around for about 20 seconds and then flew off.  Funny.  Not more than a minute later an orange hummingbird started coming at my shirt and attacking me.  He literally almost touched my shirt and I nearly fell in the water as I wasn't expecting an attack.  The damn thing kept dive bombing me for about 7 seconds and then flew off.  After a bit I realized the green hummingbird was trying to figure out if I was a flower and the orange hummingbird wanted to mate with me.

I broke my rig off, and my indicator decided to make a bee-line down river.  It was exactly 9am and I decided to call it a day.  I was back at the cabin with the wife and kids at 9:20am.  Not too shabby.

Later that day I was with Avelyn and saw this moose.  It's very cool to see all the wildlife up here.  Avi and I do an early morning every weekend and drive to see moose/elk/deer.  This morning we saw 11 deer and this one moose.

On Saturday my neighbor Tom came up and we did this trip again.  A ton more fish were caught and it was again beautiful.  All fish were small, some smaller than 3 inches, and the largest was about 7 inches.  Most were brookies, but I did manage a couple small greenback cutthroats.  Amazing coloration and beautiful fish.